Update on New Community Dock

By Paul Renard

Good news–Lakeport’s new dock is on the way!

Thanks to a great deal of work by Mary Sapp, Jonathan Hammer, Mary Ann Hoadley, Erin Cloney, Wayne Young, and a host of others in the community, we have recently signed a contract with VA Class A Contracting, Inc., for a dock replacement and repair of the nearby bulkhead. Although this has been a long haul, community involvement and input have produced a design and engineering specifications that should be very useful to us and stand up to lots of usage over time—including a floating dock section that will make launching small boats easier and safer. Building time will be about 70 days from inception with a planned start about 5 days after all permits are obtained, and we can expect some disruption to parking near Triangle Park and construction noise between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. weekdays and 9:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. weekends. All approvals from Reston Association are in place, funding has been approved by owners at the Annual Meeting, and the design has been publicized and reviewed by our engineer. So we’re ready to get started!

At the same time, we’re planning to fix the decaying bulkhead near the short leg of the dock on the Safeway side, replace the often vandalized light bollards, and deal with shoreline stabilization, erosion mitigation, and new landscaping at the other end of the dock. When the entire project is finished, RA will repave the path by the dock, which will most likely have seen some further deterioration from the construction activities.

Board member Paul Renard, working with a small dock-focused team including Jonathan and Erin, will be the point of contact with  the contractor. If you have questions or issues during construction, please contact Paul at prenard@paulrenard.com. Doing a project of this size is going to disrupt the neighborhood in a lot of ways–noise, dust, parking, closed path, moved or damaged plantings, etc. We ask for your patience because at the end, we will have a beautiful and much more usable dock with decades of life ahead, better lighting along the RA path, and a newly landscaped focal point next to the dock for the community to enjoy.